The management regulations § 24

§ 24 Organisation of material and information

Information as mentioned in Section 23, first subsection of the Framework Regulations, shall be provided in the form decided by the supervisory authorities. The scope of directly available information shall be defined in relation to the request. The document shall be
  1. a limited and coherent amount of information,
  2. prepared for a specific purpose,
  3. created in a recognised storage media,
  4. suitable for later use, including reading, playback, display, transmission or other reproduction.
For documents in their final version, a recognised document format shall be used that does not significantly change when reading, saving or printing.
Documents made available to the supervisory authorities shall clearly show
  1. document issuer and approving unit in the organisation providing the document,
  2. time of approval,
  3. whether it is a final or preliminary version.
Material and information shall be managed with a view towards joint solutions and later use.
Section last changed: 01 January 2011

The requirement in the first section whereby information shall be made available to the supervisory authorities, entails that information shall be sent to the official address, i.e. the physical or electronic mailbox, unless otherwise stated. Form means the manner in which the information is made available, for example on a separate form or in tables. Information to be sent to the supervisory authorities upon request, can alternatively be made directly available in electronic form in consultation with said authorities. Directly available means that the supervisory authorities have access to the information via electronic information systems, and can access the information themselves, as needed. Information that is made directly available, can include e.g. individual documents in connection with an audit.
The delimitation in the second sentence entails that the information available in electronic format shall be easy to navigate so that the supervisory authorities can deem the information to have been received.
The requirement for a limited and coherent volume of information as mentioned in the first subsection, litera a, does not apply to documents that are linked electronically without clear demarcations (hypertextual documents).
Document format means the manner in which characters, structure and layout are organised. The document format should be stated when the document is made available electronically.
The first subsection allows for material and information to be made available to the supervisory authorities without using the document form. This can be discussed and agreed with the supervisory authorities in the individual case.
The requirement for recognised document format in the second subsection means that the following formats should be used:
  1. as pure text: UTF-8 (ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 Annex D) or ISO 8859-1:1998, Latin, 1,
  2. TIFF – Tag Image File Format version 6,
  3. XML – Extensible Markup Language version 1.0, and
  4. PDF or PDF/A.
For documents made available pursuant to the third subsection, the preliminary versions should use a document format that best serves the objectives of reading and editing.
The fourth subsection on joint solutions and subsequent use entails that the licensees and others who take part in the activities, should manage electronic material and electronic information such that the material and the information can subsequently be recreated. This particularly applies to material that is saved electronically and information that, at a given point in time, has been made available to external users.

Offshore petroleum activities
The NORSOK Z-001 and NORSOK Z-003 standards should be used to fulfil the requirement for documents as mentioned in the first subsection, literas a and b, as regards technical operations documents.